U.K.’s Education Secretary Michael Gove got¬†teased mercilessly all over the Internets for his recent suggestion that teenagers should text amorous poetry to each other instead of nude pics. There’s an even an app for it!¬†The Love Book app lets teens record poetry and then text the recording to the object of their desire. “It [the app] will allow children to make sense of their own feelings in a way that is more graceful, expressive and beautiful [than sexting],” Gove said.¬†”Technology does not have to mean that expression becomes clumsier.”

Fun as it would be to jump on the mockery bandwagon, we’re going to take his suggestion and run with it. Because you, dear EMandLO.com readers, are not sixteen-year-old horn dogs. You understand that there is a time for raunchy photos, and there’s also a time for even raunchier words. So here are eight scorching poems (or excerpts from poems) that you might want to sext to your hot cross bunny tonight…

1.

These are the lips, powerful rudders
pushing through groves of kelp,
the girl‚Äôs terrible, unsweetened taste
of the whole ocean, its fathoms: this is that taste

– Adrienne Rich, from “That Mouth”

2.

Lady, i will touch you with my mind.
Touch you and touch and touch
until you give
me suddenly a smile, shyly obscene
(lady i will
touch you with my mind.) Touch
you, that is all,
lightly and you utterly will become
with infinite care
the poem which i do not write

– e.e. cummings, “lady i will touch you”

3.

Love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
…
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
…
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
…
O I say now these are the soul!

– Walt Whitman, from “I Sing the Body Electric”

4.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life.

– Andrew Marvel, from “To His Coy Mistress”

8.

Roses are nice,
Violets are fine,
I’ll be the six,
If you be the nine.